


All Too Short a Date

by Alchemine



Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 21:55:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14578482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: Aged twenty-one, Hecate spends a summer getting lost in her work and loving it.





	All Too Short a Date

 

Years from now, people will remember this summer as one of the finest of their lives, with warm, clear days that burnish themselves into evenings full of long shadows and mellow golden light, and then cool toward a velvety night. It’s a summer of leaves so vibrantly green and juicy that you can taste them at the back of your throat; of long, soft grass that invites you to stretch out in it and holds the shape of your body when you rise; of humming bees and vines heavy with dusty grapes; of fairy lights strung between the trees in gardens, twinkling softly in the dark.  

Hecate might as well be on the moon, so oblivious is she to these transient joys. She’s fought for and won a coveted position in the archives of a museum devoted to witching history, and as she walks there every morning from the room she’s let for the summer—no magical transportation is allowed on museum grounds, for fear of damaging the artefacts—she’s already thinking of the work she left the night before, and how to take it up again when she arrives. 

She spends the first three weeks painstakingly learning how to mix the potions they pour into tarnished chalices to clean them, how to rub oils into the bindings of ancient spell books, how to sharpen an old ceremonial knife to a razor edge, and at the end of that time, her supervisor deems her skilled enough to work on her own. Zaida is only a few years older than Hecate’s twenty-one, a delicate, smooth-skinned woman with glossy black hair and a brand of inner composure that makes Hecate feel like a bundle of raw nerves and long, skinny, ungainly limbs. She doesn’t dress in bright colours and the latest fashions like some other witches Hecate has known, but everything she wears seems to fit her as if she’s manifested it around her body instead of putting it on, and she wears her surroundings in the same way, moving through the corridors of the museum as confidently as if she built it herself, stone by stone.

For Hecate, who has spent her whole life wishing to fit in somewhere—anywhere—this is an ideal to strive toward, and she feels she’s beginning to achieve it. Six weeks in, she can spend a whole day at one of the long tables in the conservation laboratory, puzzling out the faded brown writing of long-dead witches and wizards and entering the titles of their manuscripts into catalogues, and she only remembers to stop and eat, or stand up and let the blood flow back into her legs, because Zaida reminds her to. If anything, at this point, Zaida is supervising not Hecate’s work, but Hecate herself, making certain she doesn’t stay bent over a stack of old parchments until dawn. In fact, even after she returns to her room, Hecate spends her nights dreaming of the museum and its dusty delights as she lies curled in bed, the shutters open to let in a cool wash of breeze, but Zaida is not to know that.

 _If only I could stay forever_ , she thinks as the summer passes its peak ripeness and begins to decline,  _then I would always be this happy_.

With only a fortnight left before her placement ends, she feels the time slipping away from her, tries desperately to hold onto it by spending every possible moment at work. It seems too cruel that she’s about to be forced away from the only place she’s ever felt truly content, but she is, and there is nothing she can do to change it. 

Zaida seems to notice her distress and tries to cheer her up, first taking an old glass alchemy retort that isn’t valuable enough to preserve and filling it with bluebells to put on the desk in their tiny office, and then bringing in special biscuits topped with almonds for the two of them to share over tea at the end of the day. It’s during this teatime that she finally broaches the subject of Hecate’s imminent departure, with the same calm voice she uses when explaining how to properly handle a two-hundred-year-old pickled frog.  

“You’ll be glad to go home to your family soon, I’m sure,” she says, reaching across the table for the sugar bowl. There’s a thin silver bracelet clasped round her wrist, and Hecate marvels at how even this simple decoration looks as if it were made just for her, as if some faraway jeweller thought  _Zaida Segade_  and the bracelet formed itself in his or her hands.

“I haven’t really got any family to speak of,” she says, seeing that Zaida is waiting for an answer. “Only my grandmother, and…we aren’t what you would call close.” The idea of anyone being close to Grandmother would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening, she thinks.

“Well, your friends, then,” Zaida says, and helps herself to so much sugar it makes Hecate’s teeth ache to watch her. “A whole summer’s a long time to be away, all on your own in a strange place. You must have been missing them.”

This is truer than Zaida will ever know, but Hecate does her best to smooth her traitorous face into a mask, and waves away the bowl as Zaida passes it to her.

“I’m afraid I haven’t had the time for friends since school,” she says, as coolly as possible. “Too much work to do. You know how it is.”

She thinks Zaida will come out with some version of the responses she’s heard a hundred times:  _But you’ve got to have friends, everyone has friends, do you think you’re too good for people, aren’t you lonely_. But Zaida only sits there, sipping her tea, a locus of even deeper tranquillity in the midst of the museum’s peace, and nods as if this makes perfect sense.

“Of course you should do what you love doing,” she says.  

“Yes,” Hecate says, relieved to be understood. 

“But perhaps one day you’ll find time to have a friend again as well,” Zaida says, and makes a magical gesture to upend the teapot over her cup. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive. And now I think you should call it an evening. What’s that quote about summer’s lease?”

“It hath all too short a date,” Hecate says automatically, well trained by Grandmother to recite verses in addition to spells on command. 

“That’s it,” Zaida says, smiling. “It won’t last much longer, and neither will this lovely weather, so go out and enjoy it while you can. I’ll lock up.”  


End file.
